The Dream Team
The Middlebury men’s hoops team had been NESCAC champions for about, oh, 20 minutes, when Karl Lindholm ’67 greeted a colleague and fellow Panther fan by saying, “So, not that bad.” Yet as hard as Lindholm, a lifelong New Englander, tried to maintain his Yankee stoicism, he couldn’t suppress a smile. It was that kind of afternoon.
Middlebury had just knocked off Amherst, 77-68, to capture its first ever NESCAC championship, and the scene in Pepin Gymnasium could best be described as a frenzied blur of exuberance. There was no Jim Valvano moment—head coach Jeff Brown, who would later be named NESCAC Coach of the Year, wasn’t running around looking for someone to hug because he was promptly swarmed by his players and coaching staff when the final buzzer sounded. In fact, just about everywhere you looked, someone was hugging someone else—teammates and teammates, a cocaptain and his mom, an assistant coach and his wife—many with tears in their eyes.
The Panthers had recorded their school-record 24th win of the season, a remarkable achievement, Coach Brown would say later, especially considering that the current group of seniors (Kyle Dudley, Ben Rudin, Aaron Smith, and Matt Westman) had suffered through a one-win conference tilt just three years ago, as freshmen.
A week later, Pepin was again at capacity for Middlebury’s second-round NCAA matchup against Bridgewater State. A majority of the fans sported white T-shirts, creating a sea-of-white effect in the stands, and for most of the game, folks were on their feet, screaming until they were hoarse. The Panthers led by as many as nine in the first half, then lost the lead only to wrestle it back midway through the second. And from there, it was back and forth, Middlebury’s Dudley draining a long three, matched by a three on the other end; the Panthers’ burly power forward, Smith, taking a feed in the post and executing a perfect drop step and lay-in, matched by a put-back by the Bears. And then Ben Rudin hit a pull-up jumper, his 24th and 25th points of the game, followed by a three-point play from the angular and agile Jamal Davis ’11, and suddenly the Panthers appeared to have a little breathing room.
But it was not to be. A five-point lead with about 30 seconds to play evaporated, erased, finally, on an NBA-length trey from the Bears’ Stace Garrick with 11 seconds left. Rudin, the team leader, its heart and soul, had one last look, a pull-up jumper from just above the free-throw line. It was a shot the Panthers wanted, one Rudin had made again and again in his standout career.
Yet the shot fell short and bounced softly off the front rim. A few seconds later, after the final buzzer had signaled the end of the Panthers’ magical season, 1,200-plus people were as quiet as a contingent that large could be.
Rudin, though, had one final obligation, a postgame interview with Vermont Public Radio. And in a calm manner that belied the heartbreak he surely must have been feeling, the NESCAC Player of the Year and NABC All-
American guard said, “They made two great shots . . . [the shots] were well contested, and he made them. There’s nothing you can do about that.”
A few days later, on a sleepy Sunday morning downtown, Rudin bumped into one of his biggest fans—a two-year-old who sported a Middlebury #24 jersey to most games. After giving the kid a high five, Rudin was asked by the boy’s father how he had maintained his composure in the radio interview. “It wasn’t easy,” he chuckled. “But there are worse things than losing a [basketball] game.”
Quote/Unquote
“When looking at Middlebury, then-coach Erin Quinn said to me, ‘First, make sure this is the right school for you. If you feel that it is, we can then talk about lacrosse.’ ”
— Dave Campbell ’09, in an article for Espn.com on playing sports at the Division III level. Campbell is a starting midfielder on the nationally ranked Panthers.
Go Figure
422 Number of Middlebury
students who have studied
abroad this year
43 Number of countries in
which they have studied
29 Number of students who
have studied in China
63 Number of students who
have studied in France
16 Number of students who
have studied in Egypt
5 Number of students who
have studied in Uruguay
64 Percentage of the junior class
that studied abroad this year |
Field Work
Since 2002, biology professor Sallie Sheldon and a team of researchers have been studying the effect of fertilization on the salt marshes in Massachusetts’s Plum Island Sound. The results of adding nitrogen and phosphorous to the creeks, Sheldon reports, were unexpected. For the first three years, nutrient addition had no effect on anything they measured. But in year four, things changed. “It was as if the marsh was a vessel that became filled up.” The marsh plants near margins were sloughing off into the creeks. And in some regions, the marsh had become spongy “for no reason that we understand.”
Sheldon and her team have just been awarded a second grant by the National Science Foundation to fertilize the marsh. For the next three summers, they will be sampling algae and snails in the creek, and will be doing caging experiments, caging in or caging out different animal species to see which species are affecting algal growth. They will also extensively map the area to determine where the marsh is becoming spongy and where the marsh surface is cracking off.
Bookshelf
“Fitzsimmons is the first to attempt to survey the entire corpus of Lowland Maya hieroglyphic texts, iconography, and archaeological site documentation relating to royal death, burial, and afterlife. It is an ambitious undertaking, but Fitzsimmons rises to the challenge and has produced a book that makes a lasting contribution to Maya archaeology.”
—Patricia A. McAnany, author of Living with the Ancestors: Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society, on James Fitzsimmons’s Death and the Classic Maya King. Fitzsimmons is an assistant professor of anthropology at Middlebury.
Confluence In a fascinating essay that first appeared in The New England Review and has since been translated into Hebrew in the Israeli journal Yekinton , religion scholar Robert Schine recounts the correspondence between the German writer Herman Hesse and a noted Jewish art patron, Siegfried Guggenheim—correspondence that ultimately led Hesse to alter the text of one of his books. Alter it, that is, by one word. Schine, the Curt C. and Else Silberman Professor in Jewish Studies at Middlebury, offers an enlightening and thought-provoking account of this decision. The word was “astonishingly,” and the title of Schine’s essay is “ ‘The Deleted Word’: Implications of an Altered Text by Herman Hesse.”
Graph Theory
How do power companies know how much electricity to send out to meet the demands of the consumer? Accepting that electricity is lost as it’s transported across the electrical grid, how does the power company know how many resource units are sufficient to meet demand?
Well, there’s a mathematical formula to help figure this out. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Schmitt and Anna Blasiak ’07 have been investigating graphs that allow for the needs of any consumer to be met regardless of the distribution of the resource and with the minimum amount of resources available.
We’re including one such graph. We don’t expect you to understand it—we certainly don’t—but Schmitt and Blasiak have been getting a lot of recognition from their peers. The duo recently contributed an article to the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics .
Top 5 The five best Japanese anime films, according to Japanese professor Carole Cavanaugh:
Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001)
Grave of the Fireflies (Takahata, 1988)
Akira (Otomo, 1988)
Millennium Actress (Kon, 2001)
Ghost in the Shell (Oshii, 1995)
—Carole Cavanaugh recently received a Japan Foundation Short-Term Fellowship for a study on independent animated films by contemporary artists |
WRMC’s Top 10 What are DJs spinning this spring? Herewith the top 10 albums, as of April 1:
Artist / Album
Of Montreal / Skeletal Lamping
TV on the Radio / Dear Science
Cut Copy / In Ghost Colours
Tobacco / F***ed Up Friends
Mother Mother / O My Heart
Women / Women
Sebastien Tellier / Sexuality
Calvin Harris / I Created Disco
Dr. Dog / Fate
Dear and the Headlights / Drunk Like Bible Times
Observed
» The Reverend Al Sharpton was on campus in February, speaking before a large crowd in Mead Chapel. Sharpton, who was brought to the College as part of the Middlebury College Activities Board’s annual speaker series, spoke for about 90 minutes, and he urged students to become vocal advocates for change. » Winter Carnival went off without a hitch , and by all indications, everyone had a good time. It was the 86th such carnival at Middlebury, which makes it the oldest student-run winter carnival in the country. It’s also the only carnival to achieve carbon-neutral status. » Sunder Ramaswamy, the new president of the Monterey Institute of International Studies , announced his leadership team recently. Ramaswamy, who was the Frederick C. Dirks Professor of International Economics at Middlebury before heading west, named Renee Jourdenais, a long-time MIIS faculty leader, as dean of the Graduate School of Translation, Interpretation, and Language Education; Yuwei Shi as dean of the Graduate School of International Policy and Management; and Tate Miller as dean of Advising, Career, and Student Services. » A flurry of fascinating speakers hit the campus during the last week of February and the first week of March. Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, who was made famous by Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, spoke about health and human rights. Sarah Chayes, a former NPR correspondent, discussed her attempts to help rebuild a shattered Afghanistan. And international activist John Francis delivered the keynote address for the College’s annual convocation series. Francis, known around the world as the “Planet-walker,” once spent 22 years without using a motorized vehicle after witnessing the effects of an oil spill in San Francisco Bay. » The Middlebury Quidditch Club , spearheaded by Alex Benepe ’09, received honorable mention recognition in the 2009 PR Week Awards, an annual national competition dominated by corporate PR heavyweights. Benepe’s group was a finalist in the promotional event of the year category. » Yes, that was Middlebury President Emeritus John M. McCardell, Jr, on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” in mid-March. McCardell bantered with America’s “truthiest” pundit about the presence of alcohol in American culture and his effort to stimulate discussion about the effectiveness of the 21-year-old drinking age. » Gary Hirshberg, chairman, president, and self- described CE-Yo of the organic yogurt company Stonyfield Farm, has been tapped to deliver the 2009 commencement address.
Leatherhead
American Studies Prof. and Acting Provost Tim Spears recently contributed an essay titled “The Plow that Broke the Midway,” to Sports in Chicago , a volume of stories about athletics in the Windy City. Spears’s subject was the legendary Bronko Nagurski.
MM: So, wait, your grand-father discovered Nagurski?
TS: Yes, in the 1920s he recruited him to play football at the University of Minnesota, where my grandfather was the head coach. According to legend, my grandfather was driving through northern Minnesota when he stopped at a farm and asked for directions to Duluth. The young man he asked was plowing a field, without a tractor or horse. And when the youth pointed toward Duluth, he pointed with his plow. That young man was Bronko Nagurski.
MM: This essay is as much about your family and its relationship to football as it is to Nagurski. What role did the sport play in your family?
TS: My grandfather played and coached football (and had a Hall-of-Fame career), my dad was captain of the Yale football team in the early 1950s, and my brother and I also played college football. Football dominated our family history, and over three generations, the game (and sports in general) mediated father-son relationships, guided assumptions about education, and shaped our collective sense of how boys should become men.
MM: You played football at Yale. Helmet to leatherhead, you and Nagurski, who wins in a collision on the gridiron?
TS: In the realm of fantasy, it would be an honor to get run over by Nagurski.